Unearthing Networks was presented at SCA Galleries New Contemporaries 2021.

Unearthing asks what might a future archaeologist uncover if they were unearthing the traces of one’s digital grave? Resin sculptures alluding to minerals hold preserved text from the artist’s personal Apple Notes archive. There is a symbolic intimacy that exists in the Notes app. To the smart phone generation, your Notes are your diary entries, shopping lists, passwords, drunken shower thoughts, and un-sent texts drafted to exes. They are the intimate, somewhat chaotic, deeply personal archive of the self. More significantly, it’s an archive that exists outside of network circulation. These digital relics signify power in their privacy, suggesting that the most precious parts of ourselves are those which we choose not to share online. 

Marking this grave is a neon blue headstone titled 'Dead Subjects' alluding to the signage of marketing. It’s etched with text sourced from the Spam inbox of the artist’s first email address, alliej52a@hotmail.com. By taking information from unsolicited advertising and turning it into an epitaph, it presents the language of surveillance capitalism as an absurd dark comedy. Situated in concrete rubble, the future ruin of our urban world, the work considers the legacy of ourselves we leave behind in the ever-growing archive of our digital lives.

SENIOR CITIZENS started with an image the artist posted to Facebook years ago of her now dead grandparents. The work functions as an uncanny, artificial resurrection. Across the internet, there are traces of deceased users whose data give their identity an allusion of immortality. The image’s URL was entered into Google Image Search in a bid to “search” for these lost relatives online. The work references the common practice of stalking people online to try and construct meaning about their identity, and toys with the assumption that Google will provide meaningful answers. In processing the image, Google named it “SENIOR CITIZENS”. The results of the search have been collated into a painterly composition of overlayed opaque images, printed on clear vinyl, and mounted on a backlit mirrored surface. The materiality aims to mimic the experience of looking at, and around a screen as destabilising for the viewer and the allusion of warmth and intimacy simulated by contemporary design practices. The composition is partially erased, tracing between real and artificial space, reflecting how algorithms may bring you close to what you’re looking for, but they will never show you the truth, as online space can obscure, abstract and distract from reality.

Photography: Campbell Henderson